Hunters and other outdoorsmen coming in from a wet/cold morning often find themselves in need of a way to quickly dry/warm their boots or shoes before venturing back outside. A device known in the prior art which allows one to dry sneakers and baseball caps—that is, objects with a decidedly lower profile than that of most boots—within a tumble dryer but without their being noisily tossed about in it is taught by Hope in U.S. Pat. No. 6,543,630.
Hope's device includes a drying rack secured, by a pair of spaced apart suction cups, to the interior side of a clothes dryer's door. Extending perpendicularly away from the door is the drying rack's wire frame shelf and a pair of opposing side rails fixedly attached thereto. In the case of a standard clothes dryer with its circular door hinged along one side of the dryer's circular opening, the user is obliged, when attaching the suction cups, to position the drying rack in such a way that the wire frame shelf's end distal from the door can clear the circular opening's edge as the dryer door is being swung shut. Unfortunately, in order to do so, one must limit the spacing between the circular door's horizontal mid-line and the horizontally extending wire frame shelf's end proximate with the door. Otherwise, if the shelf's proximate end were too far above/below the mid-line, the shelf's distal end would fail to clear the circular opening's edge, thus blocking the door's closure. Further complicating this problem of properly positioning the drying rack is the fact that the tops of high profile objects such as boots, especially those stood upright atop the drying rack's wire frame shelf, could, even after the wire frame shelf's distal end itself had been successfully swung clear of the circular opening's edge, still collide with it.
Hope's remedy is to use a dryer with an unusually large, generally rectangularly-shaped opening and a non-circular door that is sized to cover it and hinged to the dryer along one of the opening's two spaced apart, vertical side edges. Indeed, this opening, as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,543,630, is so large that it extends across nearly the entire breadth of the dryer itself. Moreover, the dimensions of the wire frame shelf are such that the user, in the process of attaching the drying rack to the door's inside surface with the use of the suction cups, can be assured that the wire frame shelf's distal end will clear that one of the two spaced apart vertical side edges which is widely separated from the door's hinge, provided, during this process, the user basically centers the back wall of the drying rack's wire frame with respect to both of the non-circular door's own spaced apart, vertically extending side edges and at the same time holds the wire frame shelf so that it extends horizontally. Thus, subject to substantially fewer constraints than would exist if the dryer were equipped with a standard circular opening, the user is then free to lower the drying rack until the bottom surface of the wire frame's back wall is brought into such close proximity with the lower edge of the door's inside surface that the distal end of the wire frame's shelf, potentially sagging under the weight of object(s) readied for placement atop this shelf, would not clear the rectangularly-shaped opening's lower edge if the door were to be swung shut. Alternately, the user is free to raise the drying rack until the top surface of the wire frame's back wall is brought into close enough proximity with the upper edge of the door's inside surface that the tops of object(s) being prepared for placement atop this shelf, would collide with the rectangularly-shaped opening's upper edge, as the door was being closed, if such object(s) were to be so placed.